Sam Bassett
Sam Bassett is the head of fashion film at SHOWstudio. After a degree in Media Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of the Arts, he completed a Masters in Film Directing at the University of Edinburgh.
He has edited for brands, film and TV, including feature documentaries, music videos and short films for the likes of the BBC, UEFA and Universal Music. Bassett has also directed a number of short films, documentaries and music videos. Taking a mixed media approach, he explores the grey zone between artifice and reality through the use of textures and atmosphere.
Hello Sam, how would you introduce yourself to Coeval’s community?
I’m a filmmaker with a background in documentary and am currently the Head of Film and Senior Film Editor at SHOWstudio. After studying Media Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of the Arts, he completed a Masters in Film Directing at the University of Edinburgh. Throughout and after his studies, he has edited for brands, film and TV, including feature documentaries, music videos and short films for the likes of the BBC, UEFA and Universal Music. Bassett has also directed a number of short films, documentaries and music videos. Taking a mixed media approach, he explores the grey zone between artifice and reality through the use of textures and atmosphere.
When did you first become interested in experimental filmmaking? Was fashion there from the beginning or did you pick an interest in it later on?
I’ve always been interested in blends of filmmaking. I started off being very interested in, probably the most common hybrid, documentary and fiction, and exploring the intersection between these two ‘perceived’ dichotomies. We see this hybrid form everywhere now, from glossy Netflix documentary series all the way down to TV docs with reenactment scenes. And so I think, over time, I’ve gone to the logical extreme of this and have started exploring the hybrid between documentary and the experimental.
For me experimental is a bit of a nothing word, it doesn’t really mean anything other than to describe what we can’t immediately locate, and personally, I’m ok with that. I like to use the term to define something whose focus isn’t necessarily on narrative or story and attempts to explore less tangible ideas like atmosphere. A document of time, or a moment maybe? I made an attempt at this with my last short documentary Atur, which explores a father and son navigating the turmoils of parenthood and youth, whilst their shared pagan identity both blossoms and isolates them, albeit together. There’s no story really, just atmosphere.
Fashion came later for me, and naively, I think I wasn’t always aware of its artistry. But maybe this is common because just like architecture, fashion is an art form of utility. We all have to use buildings, and we all (or nearly all) wear some form of clothes. For me, this utility creates a disillusionment with what we are engaging with. We know a painting is art because the frame is there to guide us, we know a statue is art because it’s behind a rope in a gallery. We don’t always view fashion as art because our experience of it is not disseminated in a way that we are taught to appreciate it. So I think my interest in fashion has grown in parallel to my wider understanding and appreciation of art.
Out of Dark
This is one of those impossible questions that always pop up in conversations like this: which filmmakers had the greatest influence on your work?
I’m a massive fan of Lynne Ramsay's early works ‘Ratcatcher’ and ‘Morvern Caller’ which install an unearthly sense of reality (thus a feel of documentary) in her fictional films. But I also love the absurd sereneness of people like Roy Andersson who hold static wide frames for painfully long in films like ‘A Pigeon on a Branch Reflecting on Existence’ or ‘Songs from the Second Floor’.
But for me, and I urge anyone who hasn’t seen their films to hunt them down, I really rate the work of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel. They are anthropologists and artists that work with film and have directed a number of documentaries like ‘Leviathan’, ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’ and ‘Sweetgrass’. It’s some very interesting work. I won’t say anything more about them, as I think the work speaks for itself.
You have a background in cultural studies: how did that shape your vision of filmmaking?
Cultural Studies was what I did for my first degree, and I’m really glad I studied it because it gave me a sound knowledge base for what I’ve since gone on to do. As much as it’s a tremendously fun thing, I don’t think much of film school. I see film in a much more egalitarian way. It should be a medium that everyone has access to and is ultimately a tool in order to communicate - that for some people may be better than words, music or even science. Film is a way of disseminating or synthesising information and I don’t believe that there is inherently a right or wrong way to do that. So I’m not fussed by big crews or fancy cameras, whatever you have that’s right for you and what you’re trying to do. This is one of the reasons I take quite a hands-on approach to all aspects of filmmaking, from directing, cinematography and editing. What Cultural Studies taught me, wasn’t all the interesting theories and philosophies ranging from semiotics to psychogeography, it was that contributing to the many ways of seeing and exploring your own voice is fundamental to the growth of culture.
Atur - Trailer
There’s an upcoming project of yours that explores the intersection between the organic and artifice as we become ever-increasingly reliant on social technologies. The distinction between what’s natural and what’s artificial is one reliant on the social and cultural landscape it gets formulated within: how do you see current technologies rewriting this distinction?
My first love, and it always will be, is documentary. I’ll never escape that. I’m always working on a couple of projects at one time as I’m a quite all over-the-place thinker. One of the projects I’m developing is an exploration into notions of intimacy as we become ever more dependent on technology, especially in regard to social technologies. I’d like to explore that grey zone that we enter with technology, where the organic and artifice collide. The reason I want to explore it in this manner is because I don’t necessarily see the worlds of artificial and organic as separate. It’s a very human thing to want to make things binary all the time when in reality they’re not. I think there is an extremely interesting discourse towards digital worlds, like the meta-verse, as we often refer to them as destinations we are heading toward. Almost as if humans will depart from their physical bodies and leave permanently for a new life inside a digital reality. I think this is one of the major fallacies of technology. That it’s a one-way thing. In fact, we’ve seen this type of doomsday thinking at every stage of technological advancement throughout history, from ancient Flat Earthers to Y2K, people even thought photography would wipe out painting. A more interesting way of exploring this digital advancement is to view it as a realm we can cross into, and most importantly come back out of. If we view it in this way, the meta-verse or digital realities become a space where we can learn, experiment, and create, with the ultimate goal of somehow extracting it back out into a state of organic reality (i.e. the physical world). Don’t get me wrong there are clearly inherent dangers with all technologies, but that’s why we need good policy to support these advancements.
In collaboration with Nick Knight, you recently shot an incredible short movie for the December issue of Harper’s Bazaar: what was the inspiration behind the shoot?
The shoot for Harper's Bazaar is by image maker Nick Knight. We worked together to try and create a film that just felt beautiful. A film that makes the models look good, and the fashion look good. It’s really a very simple agenda, but nonetheless a hard one to execute. We both have a shared interest in new technologies and we wanted to explore a way in which we could add an artificial quality to the film. Therefore you may notice that some of the movements repeat to resemble GIFS, and the edit flutters between fluidity and an almost error-like state.
Have you ever experimented with AI?
I use AI a lot in my workflow. All the way down from Chat GPT to Midjourney. We even tried using Stable Diffusion on the Harpers film, but in the end that section was scrapped despite producing some interesting results. I think a big problem with AI image and video generation is that it often looks, well, just a bit like AI. It does, at the moment, often have quite an ugly aesthetic, especially with what it does to faces. There was a little AI left in the film which you can see if you look closely at the edges of the frame. This is actually from a pass we did on a software called Kaiber.ai, that I used to create a masked layer with a rough texture. But away from these more experimental uses, I’m really liking what AI can now achieve with image restoration. Upscaling, digital clean-up, color and frame rate adjustment are getting to a crazy good level. It’s incredible seeing old footage remastered in higher resolutions and played back fluidly. We have ideas about the past that it is old or outdated because the context in which we are shown it is also old. There is beauty in exploring those worlds in a modern context because it shows us that time is in a way that is not defined by the limits of its own technology. This can be powerful learning when seeing things like scenes of war, or even spectacle, as maybe we will glean better readings from it and be more beneficial for today's society. I will say though, I think there is beauty in all mediums and I would always say before restoring footage to question why you are doing it and if it's needed. Sometimes you just want to watch it in 8mm, not 4K.
Winter in Berlin
For a while, fashion film seemed to be the next big thing in fashion even replacing runway shows during the COVID pandemic: how do you see filmmaking in fashion evolving? What can his specific contribution be?
Fashion film is still very early in its infancy. It’s really only 25 years in. That makes it one of film's newest genres. You take any discipline and if you look at the first 25 years it's going to look pretty wild. Rules are yet to be made, key practitioners are yet to cement themselves into the lexicon of the genre. Maybe our earliest key figure is someone like Man Ray? And more recently Nick Knight not only made a lot of fashion films, but the construction of SHOWstudio was really the first platform to offer a home to them. Like where do you even watch a fashion film? Especially hard to answer before the rise of the internet!
A big thing I’ve noticed is that there is a lot of confusion about what a fashion film is. There are art films (which I think is what we’re more involved with), TV commercials, video lookbooks, catwalk coverage, campaign films, just to name a few. This shows the wide range of ways fashion is communicated and that’s just within film. But for me, a fashion film is all of these things and none of them at the same time. Yes, it could be slotted into a television spot, or shown at a film festival but ultimately it carries a very different agenda to the specifics of the aforementioned sub-genres. Its purpose is to be an extension of the fashion photograph, to show fashion in movement. There are things or techniques I wouldn’t do when making a fashion film (like adding a narrative or voice-over), but I’m not interested in advising anyone not to do them.
As it continues to evolve I don’t think fashion film is stepping on anyone's toes, it won’t wipe out other art forms, it will just continue to slowly weave itself into the makeup of culture as more and more people engage with it. (Covid threatened a lot of what we know and love so I don’t necessarily think it's wise to say what happened in Covid is what happens under ‘normal’ circumstances, so what we saw reductions in then won’t be what we see reductions in now). It’s an exciting time to be involved with fashion film as the rules are yet to be made. And to be honest, once they’ve been made, they’re just ready to be broken.
Visuals courtesy of SAM BASSETT
interview DAVIDE ANDREATTA
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